Facebook confirms data sharing with Chinese companies
reuters.com
reuters.com
This sentence has been bothering me because it feels like his lawyers wrote it. It's specifically worded to not include issues like this one.
Ref: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/techburger/article/Zuckerbe...
From the NYTimes article:
>"But the BlackBerry app had access to all of the reporter’s Facebook friends and, for most of them, returned information such as user ID, birthday, work and education history and whether they were currently online." [1]
Birthday, work and education history are all things that user's "share" on FB no?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/03/technology/fa...
This is weasel language, used to avoid saying anything you can be held to having said, when that becomes inconvenient.
If you have complete control over who sees it, that should mean that no one else has any control over it...
> If you have complete control over who sees it, that should mean that no one else has any control over it...
Actually that quote is false: the Facebook algorithm has almost complete control over who actually sees your content.
I'm not concerned who "sees" my data - I want to know who can access it. If all it takes is a friend with a shady device, it's not comforting at all.
Did FB every clarify if sharing permissions would mitigate that API access? because otherwise the only solution is to a) defriend everyone and b) quit FB.
The fairer question to ask is if the strategy team pitching such work/product understood the moral implication of the work.
Not a Facebook employee, but I've wrestled with these questions after years in investment banking and a bit of adtech.
Almost anything that pays well isn't going to the end goal of feeding orphans, or improving society in any way.
The sentence “only available on the device” makes no sense to me as an engineer. What?
Did Facebook code review every app and OS they gave this access to? Even then, would they be able to garauntee that an update couldn’t be made to the app or some library it relied on to prevent it from harvesting the data?
If that data was encrypted, how did it get displayed on a screen without being unencrypted first and this made vulnerable to scraping?
I was an iOS and Android applications developer and I can’t think of any way to do it (at least on iOS) short of (a) keeping it completely encrypted the entire time (b) only allowing an application signed by Facebook and belonging to Facebook and controlled by Facebook completely (in iOS, at least) to get this data since iOS apps are well sandboxed from one another or (c) relying vaguely on a legal agreement that the other party not be naughty with the data contractually which means jack shit to the Chinese.
On Android - Jesus, forget about it.
In the end, a user is responsible for whom they give their username and password to. That includes typing it into an app. I hope we can redirect the publicity around this issue to scrutinizing the security of software, operating systems, and hardware. And promoting open source!
In 2009, when I signed up for facebook, I was signing up for facebook.
Not sharing with political groups and enterprises.
No one reads ToS and at that point, it should be nullified. Everyone loses their FB accounts because YOU didnt read the ToS. Facebook loses their business because they lied about people reading and accepting their ToS.
Its important to be reasonable, FB definitely went full corruption and blaming the billions of customers is laughable.
And then you try to tell people to be reasonable? That's like the pot calling the kettle black, isn't it?
In my opinion, it's American over-adherence to legal formalism to the benefit of powerful companies and the detriment of consumers that is unreasonable, not the German approach. And I say this as an American myself.
In particular, if there's some evidence that a consumer clicked a check box saying "I accept the terms of service" on a web form before submitting it, where a link to the full terms of service was offered and the check box was not checked by default, US courts will uphold far less friendly terms than German courts will.
Before you get too excited about legal jargon, no one reads the ToS. There was some study saying it would take years of your life to read it, let alone try to understand it.
ToS that are unreadable should be thrown out in court.
Everyone, including facebook knows that these are not read.
edit: mobile
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kP2I78...
But interesting that this happens to you. Never had that in Germany.
I don't have access to an iPhone, but is this option available on Firefox for iPhone?
Only one thing can destroy big company / country etc - inside job.
In my point of view this is beginning of FB's end.
charge them as a monopoly? when you have google and apple?
No users / data = no ads. No ads, no cash. No cash means no FB.
Btw Fb's losing users in big already.
I get FB messages, but I dont check my feed.
Occasionally I get event invites, but I check that every few weeks or month.
I dont want to act like I'm 'cutting edge', but was on gamefaqs when it was cool, FB in 2009, reddit in 2010. I dont use facebook anymore, we moved to snapchat and niche fourms.
Yes. Shocking as it may seem, being a monopoly isn't a problem per se. It's using monopoly power to do naughty things. That plus antitrust law is aching for extension into aggregator-like systems. (It also helps that Facebook neatly partitions into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp mandarin orange slices.)
They're going to be sorry for admitting to that when we discover that Huawei or Lenovo had been harvesting that data for other purposes.
And of course Huawei and Lenovo will use data for other purposes -- they operate under different jurisdictions than FB. They also likely cannot keep ignore data requests for "national interests" even if they wanted to. And national interests include economic interests for sure.
The simple consequence of globalization and economic integration is that what everyone does affects everyone else, and the networks of flow in information, energy, and physical commodities are so dense that it becomes very difficult to attribute cause and effect (and therefore moral responsibility) to any one actor.
If it wasn't Facebook, it would've been someone else. That's not to absolve Facebook of its behavior, just noting that there are strong incentives in place that encourage interoperability and therefore efficiency that resulted in its actions, and these incentives affect every organization worldwide.
The only way to prevent this is to build barriers to control the flow and pay the very high price of loss in efficiency. China is way ahead of things in that sense.
So even confidential company info can be taken by the government. In the US I think there are practical limits on this and companies have some ability and willingness to resist. From my limited experience the latter is not always the case in china, and I'd imagine the former is less true as well
Usage metrics have already been ticking down.
No. You will see people aren't bothered by Taiwan or other far eastern countries, perhaps there's a reason.
> pretty weird
Maybe English is a weird language. I'm esl so I shouldn't be teaching you.. The reason people don't spell it out is because it is shorter, seems more polite and are afraid of looking like this[0].
When a Jewish company makes the list, get back to us. For now, you're just diverting attention from the issue.